My First Official Day At Work

29Aug

Howdy ladies and gentlemen, time for me to blog about another chapter in the life of me. Today’s is an important one as it has to deal with the fact that I actually have a job and how I dealt with my first day yesterday. In short it kind of sucked.

This was what I was like when I got a job, but then I started working and my expression was far from jolly.

Now let’s get something the out of the way first, I AM GLAD I have a job! I’ve been looking for part-time work since I was 17 and now after 6 FUCKING YEARS I’ve finally got something official. Before this job I’d been doing agency work since last June and while that was good for a while, it was far to infrequent for me and sometimes the day wasn’t worth the hassle and long hours. So here we are with my current job and how am I finding it? Not too delightful.

Well I am now a kitchen porter and it’s not the position I originally applied for but when it was offered to me I wasn’t gonna say no was I? The restaurant has a great theme and a nice fast food menu and I like the qualities that the place stands for. As for the staff they seemed friendly enough, it’s mainly my colleagues I like, they’re all such friendly and cool people (besides a few people who are dodgy). And even though being a kitchen porter is bloody hard and tiring, it isn’t too bad when you’re with two other people powering through the work… So what’s the problem?

Well there’s a dark side to my workplace. Now this isn’t so much hate towards the food establishment, that’s fine, it’s the type of work and some of the people I have to work with that’s put me in a bad mood. Firstly being a kitchen porter is practically the worst kind of job, unless you have a crazy amount of patience and a sturdy body then you’ll get tired of doing this type of work pretty quickly. For me I don’t mind the work when we have at least 2 people in the back manning different stations, but when there are loads of pots and pans coming in with mushy food and we’re running out of space and have to do like 3 things at the same time it gets too damn chaotic yo! In addition to that this line of work requires you to have reliable co-workers and while I have 5 other people who I get along with fine, there’s 2 I don’t so much, but more on that later.

So this is what I basically do and there is a reason why that guy is not smiling, it’s not the jolliest job in the world.

The other thing that’s messed me up in this line of work is the amount of training we got, besides one main session, we’ve had to learn everything else on the fly which has led to some awkward and questionable situations when we’ve been told off for not knowing what we didn’t get trained to do in the first place.

So for the last week we’ve been and a half we’ve been training and practising for when real customers come in, we’ve been doing role places and getting to know the all the co-workers. While that was hard work, it was great because I feel like I’m getting to know some really awesome people.

But there are points where I don’t know if I’ll survive this job for even a month.

The main reason I say that is because the work can be absurdly tiring (it’s actually messed with my sleeping pattern), but more so than that, there’s one man I have to work with who really pushes my buttons. Let’s just call him “M” for now. He’s been a troubling me for days. He’s a guy who goes about saying very obnoxious things, being bossy when it comes to doing work and has a very douchebag attitude about things even though I don’t think he’s aware of it. And yesterday I had to spend 5 hours of my shift alone with him… Fuck me, it was endurance. It’s hard enough just being around M, but when you’re doing a busy shift with loads of stuff coming into the kitchen to get cleaned and he’s just bossing you around, I swear I just want to hurt him, it’s just not the one yo. 😦

In the end my first shift as a kitchen porter wasn’t the best and the fact that I had to stay until close instead of the 10pm that was set on the rota nearly killed me. But hey I need money so I should complain. However after last night I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to last at this place before the workload becomes too much for me or I kill M with my bare hands! I guess we’ll see.

5 responses to “My First Official Day At Work”

Aw man that job SUCKS but got to start some where, I did that when I was 15 and when I went to Uni started working behind bars, as in pubs not prisons haha. Bar work is great for money – tips are an added bonus and it can be fun if you work with the right people in the right kind of place where the customers are your kind of people – if I were you I would try and find a bar job and stick the stinky ‘porcelain engineer’ job!

Something tells me I have have to shift to bar work. That’s really what I’d like to do because I’ve seen the awesome side of it, working with people you like and getting tips. It’s some cool shit, but since I messed up at bar work last November, I’ve still been kind of shook up about going back to the bar (though it wasn’t my fault coz I’ve never had formal training). Plus this is my first job so I’m not sure I’ll be able to switch so easily. I guess we’ll see, I deffo know I don’t wanna do this forever. 😛